Month: October 2004

“Elite designers against IKEA” – an IKEA hoax

Swedish furniture giant IKEA is the target of this campaign from “Elite designers against IKEA” who portray IKEA as the source of all evil design. The designer Van den Puup writes:

“We design profound and beautiful furniture for those with wealth and taste. Which is why IKEA makes us furious livid and angry. Do their designs live, breathe and growl? Are they born from tears of pain? Do they gently touch the bottom of the human soul? Pah! Of course not, no more than weeds can attract a bee. The big blue place is odious, its affordable design is sickeningly shallow and we loathe it even more than we loathe football. Please join us in our unqualified hatred.”

Or at least that is what we are supposed to believe. From what I can tell, this seems to be a marketing stunt by IKEA’s Danish advertising agency Robert/Boisen & Like Minded. The domain elitedesigners.org is registered by Michael Robert at Robert/Boisen & Like Minded and on the ad agency’s own web site, IKEA is listed as one of the clients. The agency has launched other web sites for IKEA, like IKEA-fans.dk with an amateurish look, complete with rotating gifs and dreadful design to look as non-corporate as possible.

Clever and fun you guys. Maybe this will start some buzz about IKEA. I’ve done my part.

UPDATE: It seems that this is part of an ad campaign in the UK with three tv commercials and print ads on the theme “At home with Van den Puup”. Seems like a cool campaign, but since web sites have global reach we who don’t see the rest of the campaign might not get the message.

The blogosphere doubles every 5 months

I’ve been nagging about the lack of interest for blogging in Sweden. Now Dave Sifry of Technorati has some stats that might get a few local trend watchers up and running. Apparently the blogosphere doubles every five months and Technorati now tracks 4 million blogs. That figure was 3 million just three months ago. Ignore at your own peril. (Via Corporate Engagement).

In another post today, Sifry examines the relationship between blogs and big media in terms of inbound links. Big media sites are on top but “a large number of people are getting news, information, and opinion from outside of the mainstream media, and … these sources are rivaling or exceeding the attention paid to smaller “professional” sites”.

In Sifry’s chart, the top five web sites ranked by number of inbound links are still traditional media web sites (www.nytimes.com as #1). But 20 of the top 40 are blogs, which shows how blogs are eating into big media’s business concept of delivering consumer attention to its advertisers. If blogs are already this influential it can only mean that we are witnessing a transformation of considerable ad spending from big media to blogs. It may not yet have happened but ad money goes where eyeballs go, that’s just the way it is.

Sifry also writes that there are approximately 8000 blogs that have between 100-1000 inbound sources and tens of thousands of blogs with between 50-100 inbound sources.

The insanity of embargoing press releases

Journalists may sometimes depend on having a good relationship with influential PR people and therefor more willing to accept an embargo on a news story, but 1) you can never count on it and 2) bloggers don’t. So if you are distributing a press release with embargo your whole launch plan might be out the window if the recipient doesn’t feel like playing along with your rules. I never understood the purpose of an embargo anyway.

Sam Whitmore’s Media Survey spills the beans on today’s launch of MSNBC.com’s RSS feeds. The story is a bit embarrasing for the PR agency who sent the email. The agency just changed name to DBC Public Relations Experts and then managed to spell the headline wrong: “EMABRGOED: MSNBC.com Users Get Personally Relevant Headlines Delivered Directly to Their Desktops”. Maybe Sam didn’t understand what emabrgoed meant.

Via Micropersuasion.

Kryptonite crisis and its impact on the blogosphere

Dave Sifry has an interesting graph on the number of blog posts in the blogosphere and how it relates to certain events. The Kryptonite bike lock controversy for example created two spikes – first when the news broke in the blogosphere, and second when traditional media picked up on the story which made bloggers discuss the implications.

The Kryptonite case will go down in history as classic example on what happens to a company’s reputation if it fails to handle crisis PR in a blog enabled world.

Via Mymarkup.